Blue Velvet
by Miranda Crystal-Bearer
Summary: Sophia Leandros never wanted a child. She got Niko anyway...and five years later, she lost him.


**A/N:** This was supposed to be a drabble. A quick character sketch. I wondered why, if Niko was an accident, that Sophia kept him.

EIGHT PAGES LATER.

I do not own anyone from the Cal Leadros series. Beware random OCs.

* * *

Sophia Leandros met Emilian Kalakos one warm March night in 1984. It was a gathering of clans, a meeting that happened rarely among the restless Rom. He was blonde and magnificent, like a Greek god. She was svelte, wearing a blue velvet dress, with hothouse flowers pinned in her long black hair. They danced around the bonfire, and slipped away from some...bolder fun. Sophia was riding a thin line, breaking tradition left and right, spurning her parent's desires. They were so_ old fashioned_. She was young and bright and besides, this was America, not the old country. So much opportunity for a teenager. She wasn't going to be tied into an arranged marriage, or mind the boring clan duties. What monsters needed watching could watch themselves, as far as she was concerned.

She didn't really notice at first; a mild stomach flu picked up as they traveled was bounced around the circus she was working with. She couldn't seem to kick it for a month. Then she was fine, healthy as ever, and while her fortune-telling racket was still not quite the attraction she wanted it to be, well, she had plans. The old bearded lady was giving her tips.

Sophia didn't find out she was pregnant until she was four months along; a sweep to pick up fraudulent circus members scooped her up, and it was in the county jail infirmary she learned she was pregnant. Too far along, too expensive to get an abortion, and even so, Sophia wasn't certain. Her parents, her clan, they condemned such things. But she...didn't want a child. Didn't want to be tied down. She waited on bail and counted the weeks and tried to decide who it could have been. What doorstep was she going to lay this at? Who was she going to demand child support from? Money was important, after all, and the extra income...

The problem was, she'd been with too many. She couldn't remember.

Maybe her parents had been right about that.

Sophia dismissed the notion, and alternately despised and speculated about the child growing within her.

It wasn't until the baby was born that she had a clue.

Niko Leandros was born two and a half weeks too early, due to an unfortunate car accident. Sophia woke out of a drugged sleep to find herself no longer pregnant. For a hazed moment she didn't know what was wrong, only that something was. No life within her - it was gone. She stared at the late afternoon sunshine on the blank beige wall and wondered how she was supposed to feel. She vaguely remembered the wreck. The pain in her head. And everyone, everyone screaming. She'd been in the van with Duncan and his trick ponies, and it'd gone over sideways and the horses had screamed like humans. Sophia reached up with clumsy fingers to feel at her head, find the line of stitches along her brow, the scar there she'd carry for the rest of her life.

She didn't know the child was even alive until an hour later, when the nurse walked in and asked if she wanted to see the baby.

Stunned, Sophia made a startled noise that the nurse interpreted as a yes, and the white-clad woman vanished away again. Sophia pulled herself higher in the bed and wondered what she would do with this...thing. Child. She'd never liked children.

She didn't know if she'd like this one.

It was dry and clean and very small, wrapped in a white blanket in the crook of the nurse's arm. It had pale blue eyes and dark skin to match her own. That was definitely not her nose, though. Sophia held the infant awkwardly, one arm stiff and splinted, and peeled the blue stocking cap off the infant's soft head.

Blonde. The baby had a thick head of whispy white-blonde hair.

Sophia could then instantly narrow down the number of men she'd slept with that had been blonde. There weren't a lot - Sophia liked her men in the flavor of tall, dark, handsome, and rich. The the child's dark skin spoke of her own blood, and she had a good three candidates. But first...first she had to name the child, the nurses said.

"Nikolai," Sophia said, her father's name jumping from her lips. Then she shook her head. "No. Niko." A diminutive, an honoring thing to do. Not that it would make her parents ever accept her back now, no. She didn't want them to, but the name felt right to her.

It took her six long months to track down the father. Six long months to find Emilian Kalakos. Six long months to find that she hated children, even this one, especially this one who screamed and cried and was dirty and fussy and needed her so much. Sophia was never having another child. And she could have given this one up for adoption...but even she had not abandoned the old ways so much. A stranger, a_ gadje_ raising one of the blood? No, she couldn't. She'd give the child later to a relative. Her cousin, perhaps, who'd offered Sophia a place to stay for a while. But first, Sophia wanted to find Emilian Kalakos, and demand of him the support she'd need to raise this screaming squalling demon he'd visited upon her body.

Emilian laughed at her. He was an unkind man. She'd seen that about him before, and she saw now he did not respect her. Wanted nothing to do with her or the child. They were a shame to him, and she spat on him and cursed him.

She went to her cousin Rose. Her cousin delighted in the baby, and took over almost all the care. Sophia let her with weary relief and shook her head when Rose gasped over the name. "I was in the hospital. Sick. I didn't know what else to say."

"Your father is both pleased and angry," Rose reported, dandling the chubby chattering baby on her knee. Niko was a bright active infant with wide seeing eyes and a toothless smile. He smiled at everyone, including Sophia. She didn't know why, as often as she'd cried and screamed as he did too. She was not a mother. She didn't like the child, except for sometimes when he was being quiet and good asleep on her shoulder, or sometimes when he reached up just to her. Those little moments made her wish she could like this child that was her flesh and blood.

"I've no doubt. He can fucking stuff it," Sophia declared, and grinned as the profanity and disrespect made Rose's grey eyes widen in shocked horror. Oh, Sophia, she was the wild one, they said of her, and Sophia delighted in making that true.

Day and months grew wings and flew, and Niko grew larger, louder, more trouble. Oh so much more trouble! He started crawling early and was a regular Houdini at escaping sight and getting into everything he shouldn't. He burned his hands grabbing a hot curling iron, he upended glasses of all shapes and size, he fell down the stairs, he fell out the window, he fell into the pond. He started to walk before he was a year old and Sophia was forever having to catch the devil-child, chase him down, try to make sure he wasn't getting into the rat poison, the mouse-traps, the trash. He swallowed buttons, he swallowed pennies, he choked himself on a marble. Sophia took him with her in sheer desperation when she told fortunes in the old tattoo parlour in town and Niko crawled under the table and untied people's shoes and upended purses and bags. Sophia couldn't take him with her and couldn't leave him home and good God Almighty she was so sick of this little blonde demon.

Rose tried to help. She did. But she had to work too and Niko was taxing and Niko was trouble and one day Rose lost him and Sophia and Rose and half the town turned out to look for the toddler, by then barely two years old. With snowfall and freezing temperatures looming, they finally found him a mile away at a neighbor's abandoned barn, playing with a litter of kittens. Sophia went home with him and Rose, and drank herself stupid before going to bed, trying to forget that she'd been worried to the point of nausea over the idiot child.

"Sophia, I think something's wrong with Niko," Rose said, one day, as the little blonde terror napped in the spring sunshine. He was two years old and some months. Sophia looked up tiredly.

"He's healthy as a horse, they said so at his last vaccination visit." Free healthcare was something the government was excellent for, Sophia had found. And she got food-stamps now.

"Yes, but Sophia, when was the last time you heard him say anything?" Rose pressed.

Sophia had to stop and think about it. As an infant Niko had babbled incessantly. Somewhere along the way, that had stopped. Niko grinned and Niko scowled, he gestured and he nodded and pointed, but Sophia couldn't remember the last time she'd heard more than a wordless shriek of laughter out of him. Or a devastated howl when he decided he wanted to get his way. She scowled. That wasn't right, was it? "Not only is he a demon, he's a retarded one," Sophia sighed. Wait, hadn't there been some disability benefit she could get from that?

"I don't think so," Rose said, doubtfully. "He's very smart. He knows what we're saying. But he doesn't talk anymore."

Sophia didn't know what she thought about that.

"Do you have dreams for him, Sophia?" Rose asked, after a moment.

"I do." Sophia had a sliver of Seeing in her, only enough to see blurred dreams of things far away. Nothing that helped in her fortune-telling, save sometimes when she saw great disaster. She more often saw her family, her close relatives. Blood was the strongest binding, after all. And some nights, in her dreams she saw a man with strong features and her own grey eyes, his blonde hair pulled away from his face and a quiet greatness in him.

It was hard to associate that solemnness with the child who was sleeping...Sophia glanced at him and found he'd vanished again. No longer sleeping.

No longer sleeping, and out the door, and somehow into the first awake wasp's nest of spring. Sophia's head rang with the pained howls.

Two weeks later, a circus came through town. Desperate to earn more money, Sophia left with them as their newest attraction. She took Niko with her, after a long, long long internal debate. In the end she took him because she saw, in her dreams, the blonde man had someone with long dark hair beside him.

The circus appealed to an active child, and if Sophia had thought him trouble before, dear God and his archangels, Niko was twice the devil he had been. Into everything, absolutely everything, from the snakes to the knife-thrower's trunk to the horses. He loved the horses and soon Sophia could track him down to the stable tents and trailers, where oblivious of the danger the toddler would find a horse or pony to sit with. Sophia took to drinking to help herself sleep at night and if she put a little of the stuff into Niko's juice well it made him sleep good and hard.

One hot depressing October afternoon, somewhere in Texas, Sophia was drinking a mint julep when Niko walked up to her and pulled at her sleeve. Sophia stared down at him, unimpressed. "What."

Niko blinked. "I'm hungry," he said, perfectly clearly.

He was two and a half, a few months short of three. Sophia stared, this time in surprise. "You're what?"

"I'm hungry," Niko repeated. "Fish sticks?" This hopefully, big grey eyes wide under his thick blonde bangs.

What the hell, thought Sophia. What the fucking hell. "Alright. We'll go get you fish sticks." She shook her head, and got to her feet, still stunned. Two years of silence and here he was talking perfectly clearly, without a lisp like so many children his age had. She headed down out of the trailer and towards the mess tent. Niko jumped down the steps, little arms flapping for balance, and trotted along beside her, bare feet dirty and bits of hay stuck in his hair.

"Hey, Horace, kid wants fish sticks!" she called, to the head cook, who had a fondness for the beautiful Gypsy woman and her devil-child.

"Does he? How'd you know, huh?" Horace grumbled, leaning over the table to peer at Niko.

"I told her," Niko said, piping voice perfectly clear.

Horace's marijuana joint fell right out of his mouth to hit the floor. Well, Sophia thought, at least she wasn't the only one.

Once Niko started talking, he didn't shut up. He asked questions. Unending streams of questions. Sophia didn't know if she was going to pull all her hair out or not, but she wasn't the only one who wished Niko would go back to being a silent presence again. Now he wasn't just constantly underfoot, he was constantly underfoot and chattering a mile a minute, asking everything from 'why is the sky blue' to 'what makes poop' to 'why do trees grow up' and, lastly, one that gave Sophia the heebie-jeebies, 'why can't you see monsters all the time'? Either he was just that observant, she decided, or he had some of the Sight that was in her clan, to tell the monsters from the humans so young. And he knew, oh he knew, from the werewolf strongman in the show to the goochie haunt that tried to steal him and eat him in the depths of a Georgia night. He ran screaming blue bloody murder and the whole circus roused to save him...or finish killing him. Sophia wasn't sure which. The child had a pair of lungs that he had no qualms about using.

When Niko was three Sophia walked away from the circus and picked up a better job in Las Vegas, reading palms and foretelling the cards. It was here Emilian Kalakos found her again, and they stared one another down in malice.

"I've heard he sees monsters," Emilian said.

"Oh, now you want him," Sophia ground out, bitterly. She was a long way from eighteen and impressionable now.

Niko, she noticed, looked exactly like Emilian - blonde and with a stubborn nose. Only her grey eyes and the gracefulness of her body had stamped Niko as her own. She was gratified, pettily so, when Niko took one look at Emilian and hid behind her skirts, refusing to be seen or speak even the tiniest peep. She chased Emilian out with harsh curses and whiskey bottles, and wondered if she felt justified or desperate because she was again stuck with this little blonde demon that smiled so prettily at her before running away to play and break or bend or destroy something. Toys, books, dishes, even the furniture. Niko played hard and Niko played rough and Niko loved knocking things over.

Three days after Emilian visited, Sophia lost her temper when she found Niko had cracked her crystal ball. That was the first time she hit him, right across his little face. He was knocked down by it - he'd never been a big child - and they stared at one another in silent shock, grey eyes round.

Sophia sat down on the floor and Niko sniffled, hiccuped, his chubby cheek bright red.

Sophia never remembered who started crying first. The rent was due, she had no money, her food-stamps were used up for the month, her crystal ball was cracked, the devil-child had managed to set fire to her best dress the day before, and now she'd hit him and she couldn't get rid of him and she didn't know what else to do. So she cried and got drunk and cried a little more, and when Niko was asleep she went out on the street and got high.

Oh, it wasn't the first time she'd done it, but it was the first time she'd done it to get away from the royal mess that was her life. What had happened? She was gonna be big, famous, a fortune-teller with her own shop, even a call-in telephone line. She'd been destined to marry someone rich and famous, live a pretty life, have a fancy car. And now she was almost twenty-two with no money to her name, a one-room apartment in an ugly part of Vegas, and a child she'd never wanted and had never really loved (except when he called her 'Sophie' and crawled into her lap to hug her neck and kiss her cheek. She thought that might be love, when he was so sweet like that).

Sophia stared at the cold glass rubble of her dreams and hopes and decided she didn't like Vegas anymore.

She stole a car and headed out to California, with a toddler that couldn't be tamed and a growing cloud of despair that she just couldn't leave behind.

Sophia didn't find any angels in Los Angeles. She found men disguised as demons, and she found her own inner demons in the bottom of a bottle and in the shine of a silver needle that made the world go away. Made the guilt go away. Niko was afraid of her now, flinched when she touched him, because he was bright and smart and sensitive and she'd hurt him and they couldn't forget it. She leaned more heavily on the drinks and the drugs and Niko slowly went silent again.

Sophia woke up on Niko's fourth birthday and realized he hadn't said a word to her in an entire month.

She went out and didn't come back until the next day, hungover and buzzed and sick at the world, at herself. She gathered Niko up, and headed out across the country, looking for someplace better.

That spring, the Auphe found her.

They offered her a deal. They offered her gold. And Sophia, stranded in the Midwest without a means of contacting her clan, with a broken-down car and child so sick she wasn't sure he was going to survive and a desperate, dying craving for some heroin...

...she took the gold.

With Niko in the hospital with meningitis, getting the treatment he so badly needed, Sophia let a monster use her body and tear what was left of her dreams to pieces.

She converted the gold, got her fix, and went to visit Niko in the hospital.

Three weeks later, she was pregnant with a monster's spawn and completely, utterly homeless. Her clan had cast her out, thrown rocks and spit on her. They didn't care that Niko had almost died, didn't care that one of the rocks had hit him on the temple and he would have a scar there he'd carry for the rest of his life. They cursed her out of their lives and out of their help and Sophia picked up her child and walked away. Niko put his face in her neck, and cried because they'd been mean to his Sophie.

He'd never called her mother, or mom, or anything like that. Only a diminutive of her name, her childhood nickname, short and soft in his child's mouth.

Two months after Niko's fifth birthday, she gave birth to a monster's spawn. She bled for weeks, as she'd bled after the Auphe, and fiercely hoped that she and this abomination would die. That thing, it had cost her so much. Cost her the clan, her last hope, every dream. And that monster stole Niko, too.

Because after that, after she screamed and cried and drank herself stupid, Niko never again looked at her with his child's smile and called her Sophie.

She hated him then. She'd never liked children. She'd never wanted children. And so she hated him, hated that the monster had stolen him, that the monster called his name so soft and sweet and hated that Niko smiled at the monster like it was worth something. Like it hadn't cost her everything in her life. She hated him, couldn't stand to touch that monster, and Niko grew used to being slapped, to ducking thrown bottles, to the tirades of abuse and hate and disgust. Disgust with herself, with her world, with all that she'd lost. She had nothing left, nothing at all.

For Niko's tenth birthday she left an old book on the kitchen table, a copy of Beowulf.

For her thirtieth birthday, she found a new scarf laid over the end of her bed - it was blue velvet with ink-black tassels.

When he was fifteen, he walked into the kitchen, and she looked at him, and she saw in him the man from her dreams, so long ago: blonde hair pulled back from from strong features, and a quiet greatness in him. And she knew then the dark-haired figure she had seen was not her and it never had been.

Niko stared at her solemnly as she raised her bottle of whiskey and saluted him.

"O Captain! My Captain," she drawled at him, bitterness choking her, and drank.

Niko's lips parted, and he drew in a breath. "Our fearful trip is done," he whispered, and his voice was a man's deep bass as he quoted Walt Whitman back at her.

She owed him nothing more. The monster had stolen her child and turned him into a man she did not know anymore.

Sophia closed her eyes and drank.


End file.
